Quality time

(Cross-posted from Wicked Smaht Thoughts)

Over the past decade or so, we've heard so much blather about "quality time" at home that the phrase has become a parody of itself. No one can say it without irony, or at least air quotes. Personally, I think that the concept of quality time was invented by people who felt guilty about how little time they were spending with their children, so they decided, "It's not the quantity of time I spend at home; it's the quality." Right.

The funny thing about kids, though, is that you have to have quantity time in order to get the quality time. You see, they determine when quality time arrives, but you have to be there for it to happen. You can't just sit Junior down and say, "Son, we're going to have some quality time now, and make memories that will last a lifetime. Want to know the meaning of life?" I've seen some friends try -- God help them -- and the next sentence is usually something like, "Son, please don't wipe your boogers on my pants. I just got them back from the cleaners."

What I want to know is, why doesn't anyone ever talk about quality time at work?

At work, we trade quality time for "face time," proving our commitment to our company's success by daily wasting hours of our time there. We say, "I could be doing something better with my time, but because I love this place I'm going to sit here and surf the Net until my boss goes home. That's what makes me a valued employee." And then we go home just in time to kiss our kids good night, spend a little quality time with the TV, and go to bed.

Have you bought into this? Ask yourself these questions, and then try to answer them honestly:

• At the end of the day, what are you most proud of: the things you accomplished that day or the time you put in?


• When you go to a performance review, what measure do you use to prove your value to your company?


• Does "hard worker" feature prominently in your self-description?

That's what I thought.

What if we switched the measurements? What if we sought quality time at work and face time at home? What would that look like?

For one thing, we'd probably accomplish a lot more in both places. At work, we'd look at our day and ask, "What can I accomplish today? How can I make a meaningful contribution to my company's bottom line and my coworkers' lives?" We would think twice before scheduling that meeting, because that's a lot of quality time in one place so it will have to generate a heck of a return. We would start proving ourselves by what we delivered rather than how much effort we expended.

We might even stop bragging -- sure, it sounds like complaining, but we all know you're bragging -- about how busy we were, and how everyone wanted a piece of us. Instead, we'd brag about how we got everything done in time to see all seven exruciating innings of our kid's baseball game, including the inning where every batter hit a home run because the entire infield was chasing a field mouse.

We might stop taking up space and start making the most of the only totally irreplaceable resource on this earth: time.

By the way, this doesn't just apply to people with families. I'm not advocating free time for moms and dads, with the singles picking up all the slack. Though if any of you want to babysit, please let me know. Even if you don't have a family, there has got to be something better you could do with your time than spend it at work. Do you have any dreams? Then pursue them now, before the sleep deprivation of early parenthood makes your brain so soft you forget what those dreams were. No dreams? Then borrow someone else's for a while until you come up with your own: volunteer somewhere where people are trying to get a second chance at life. That way, you get two lives for the price of one.

This isn't the social equivalent of string theory: it's a simple decision to put your effort where you say your priorities are. You don't have to wait for your boss to give you permission, either. If you deliver everything he asks you to do, and you do it well, he can't really complain if your car leaves the parking lot before his. And if he does really give you a hard time, then I bet that a lot of companies will be impressed by someone who has the courage to be "an efficient, delivery-oriented employee," and who refuses to simply take up space. I know I do.

Mother, brother, sisters, and me

Every company is, in essence, an extended family. We have the parental figures, the sibling rivalries, and the uncle no one likes to talk about. We also have all of the emotional connections that people used to form only with family and neighbors. Some companies embrace this fact, creating an "Us against the world" mentality, or welcoming their new employees into "the Globalcorp family." Other companies try to "keep things on a professional level," maintaining that employment is nothing more than a fiscal contract to provide labor in return for wages, and it's never personal.

The fact is, it's impossible for work to not be personal. People are emotional creatures, instinctively seeking connections with everyone we meet. It is impossible to spend 8 (or more) hours per day with a group of people and not form a bond with them, which is why it is ludicrous to me to see managers and human resource professionals try to deny this basic fact: we are family.

50 years ago, companies still acted like families, with all of the positive and negative results that you would expect. Workers felt a sense of belonging, of commitment, of brotherhood with their employers and fellow employees. The overriding career goal was to find a company where you could spend your whole working life, working your way up through the ranks until it was time to take your gold watch and retire. This was a direct descendant of the family trades of the previous centuries, where the son either learned his father's trade or apprenticed in another trade and likely married into his master's family. There was both emotional and financial security in this model, and people mixed work and family much more freely than they do today.

Of course, not every family gets along, and the bitterest feuds are among blood relations. These same expectations for a stable career and a lifelong commitment to a corporate parent were the fuel behind the union riots and other violent management/labor clashes of the early and mid-1900s. Had the arrangement been merely a financial one, perhaps tempers wouldn’t have flared so brightly.

Recent trends of the last two decades -- job-hopping, a highly skilled technical work force, exaggerated boom/bust cycles in business -- have reduced the sense of family at work and have encouraged the notion that "it's nothing personal." Now we think that it's best to go where the money is, exchanging one job or one work force for another when the price is right. While this attitude is financially convenient for both sides of the employment contract, I would argue that the hidden cost is much greater than the financial benefit.

Whether or not it is logical, people need to feel a sense of camaraderie with their fellow workers. They need to feel that they are working for something bigger than themselves, be it a greater cause or a larger group. They work harder and feel more satisfaction from their work when they see others benefiting from it. If you take that away from them, make it all about me, my job, my paycheck -- essentially reducing them to numbers on a balance sheet -- they quickly lose motivation and their work suffers.

It is considered common knowledge in HR circles that you can’t motivate someone with a paycheck. Money is a necessary part of the equation (a man's got to eat), but it should be treated as a reward for work well done, not the reason for doing the work in the first place. People have even been willing to forgo their paychecks during tough times when they believed in their company. Why, then, do we so quickly reduce people to cost centers when times are tight? Why do we make it so easy for them to jump ship the moment that a slightly better offer comes along?

I believe that we need to recapture that sense of family in our workplaces. We need to stop trying to draw the line between "work" and "home," as though there were some way to bifurcate our personalities into "Work Joe" and "Home Joe." We need to take the same principles that we rely upon to build strong families and use them to build strong companies. If we do that, we can recapture that sense of dedication that leads to such great leaps in creativity and productivity. We can build an atmosphere where, even when things go wrong, everyone pulls together to make them right. We can harness all that energy that is currently being wasted in 8-, 10-, or 12-hour days and give people their lives back, without sacrificing excellence.

This isn't a dream: I've seen it happen, albeit on a small scale. It is possible to build relationships and products at the same time, if we are willing to make the effort to hire the whole person, not just the skill set.

Unfortunately, this is no grass roots movement. The attitudes and practices that make this possible must start at the top and trickle down. Unless the leaders of a company are willing to also be the heads of the family, any mid-level effort at building the family/team will eventually be sabotaged by rapid growth, reorganization, layoffs, or just plain poor management. It has to be a family affair.

Making progress stick

The Lazy man's archenemy is work done twice. To someone who wants to do the least amount of work for the greatest gain, doubling that work for no extra gain is revolting. So how do you avoid covering the same ground more than once?

Mark your trail
Take notes in every meeting and publish them ASAP. Volunteer to take notes and publish them for everyone and you will receive two immediate benefits:

1. You will gain everyone's appreciation for saving them the trouble of taking notes.


2. You will own the official memory of what happened in that meeting. While I don't recommend trying to record things that didn't happen, you will have the advantage of being able to phrase things as you would have said them, eliminating any gray areas that could cause trouble later.

Taking notes is especially useful when asking someone to agree to something they don't like, because nine times out of ten they will conveniently forget the disagreeable part of the decision. If you work with anyone who habitually says, "I never said that," or "I don't remember agreeing to that," you can either start publishing notes or start buying Maalox by the case.

This short-term memory loss appears to grow stronger with each successive career advancement, so if you are dealing with anyone at VP level or above, sharpen your pencil.

Learn to write
This is the corollary to the previous point. The ability to communicate clearly and concisely in writing will immediately separate you from the crowd, because no one seems to do it anymore. If you can show people that reading what you wrote will be worth their while, you can make decisions more quickly, reduce the number and duration of meetings you have to attend, and make your decisions stick. Written communication has the immediate benefit of recording a decision process so that you don't have to go back later and try to remember what was said. Email and discussion groups also allow people to contribute to the decision process whenever they have time, so you don't have to wait a week to put them all in one room in order to get their attention. Build credibility with your writing, then drive people to make decisions in writing, asynchronously, by email or discussion thread.

Silence = Assent
Make it clear from the beginning of a project that there will be one decision-making process, and not participating means agreeing with the decisions made by those who did. If someone is too busy to take part in the process but has to approve the decisions, arrange the reviews in advance. Look out for the executive team member who never responds to email or comes to project meetings. Hunt that person down before you make any major decisions, to ensure that he doesn't hunt you down 3 weeks later.

Make a decision
Push to a decision, any decision, before making a decision to make a decision at a later date. Better to settle even part of an issue today than to spend an hour or more of everyone's day with nothing to show for it.